CENSI Martina

Martina Censi is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Bergamo (Italy). From 2016 to 2018, she was a researcher in Arabic language and literature at Université Rennes 2 (France), where she remains a research associate at the Équipe de Recherche Interlangue: Mémoires, Identités, Territoires (ERIMIT). She holds a dual Italian-French doctoral degree, and during her PhD, she stayed in Lebanon, where she was a research associate at the Institut Français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) in Beirut. She is also a research associate at CEFREPA (Centre Français de Recherche de la Péninsule Arabique, CNRS), in Kuwait.
Her research interests revolve around modern and contemporary Arabic language and literature, with a focus on narrative production in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Oman. In her studies, she is concerned with the literary production of women writers, representations of the body, on which her monograph Le Corps dans le roman des écrivaines syriennes contemporaines: Dire, écrire, inscrire la différence (Brill, 2016) revolves. She is also interested in the processes of identity construction of individuals and collectivities in contemporary Arab societies.
She deals with representations of the migrant and the experience of migration in the modern and contemporary Arab novel. On this topic, in addition to having published articles in scholarly journals, she has co-edited the following two works: M. Gharrafi and M. Censi (éds) (2023). Poétiques du récit migratoire, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes; M. Censi and M. E. Paniconi (eds) (2023). The Migrant in Arab Literature: Displacement, Self-Discovery and Nostalgia, New York & London, Routledge.
She is also interested in ecocriticism applied to Gulf literature and the connections between trauma and contemporary artistic production in Arab countries.
She is a member of the scientific committee of the journal LiCArC (Littérature et culture arabes contemporaines, Garnier, Paris) and of the Editorial Committee of the series “Trajectories of Gender, Cultures and Social Change in the Middle East”, published at the University of Exeter Press.